As organizations continue to compete based on customer experience, call center performance has become a critical business focus. The first call between a contact center agent and a customer can impact the customer's mindset for the rest of the relationship.
Research reveals that 87% of customers say talking to a human via phone made them feel more confident in making high-consideration purchases than purchasing online.
Thus, the success of a contact center is directly tied to the performance of the professionals staffing it and the technology that supports them. In other words, an effective contact center quality management program lays the foundation of brand loyalty, driving revenue growth.
The question here is how you put the right people in the right place at the right time to help you meet your customers' ever-growing demand. This is where automated quality assurance comes in.
Call center quality management technology is evolving rapidly. With each advancement, emerging strategies promise to push automated QA to the next level, delivering unique value to the enterprise & concerned customers. But what exactly is contact center QA, how can it help boost revenue through customer retention & what are the latest trends to keep an eye on?
Keep reading to know more!
In today’s post, we'll cover:
- What is contact center QA?
- Why is Automated Quality Assurance the need of the hour?
- What does the future hold for Contact Center QA?
- Intelligent Automation
- Enhanced Agent Coaching
- Efficient Evaluation
- Improved Analytics
- Better QA Monitoring Accuracy
- More Intuitive
What is Contact Center QA?
Quality assurance (QA) in contact centers is a process that helps ensure customer interactions align with your business goals. It is done by monitoring and evaluating your team based on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you have set.
There is an abundance of challenges faced by call center QA teams, including agents, and managers, resulting in an inefficient workforce & unhappy customers. Since the volume of calls to be assessed is huge, call center quality assurance may seem challenging. Moreover, call centers are often flat in structure, offering agents little to zero upward mobility.
In most cases, the contact center quality assurance is entirely manual. With an overwhelming amount of data, analysts have no option but to use multiple systems only to assess a single call.
Another huge challenge is that performance standards aren't entirely clear. It is almost impossible for teams to effectively improve contact center performance when they are not equipped with enough data to make data-driven decisions.
Call center QA aims to identify common customer issues, improve customer experience, and help standardize communication processes with customers. There are mainly two categories of data, also known as quality parameters, that are assessed while monitoring QA in call centers.
- Call & Customer Metrics: include average response time, handling time, customer satisfaction ratings, NPS ratings, CSAT scores, productivity metrics, etc.
- QA Assessment: this helps analyze sample customer interactions by assessing the resolution and professionalism against a standard scorecard. This helps measure improvement over time to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.
Why is Contact Center QA the need of the hour?
Contact center quality assurance helps enhance the agent's performance & maximize customer satisfaction. When your end-user interactions are of the highest quality, volume decreases, thus increasing the key performance indicators.
In fact, research reveals that more than 90% of organizations that do quality assurance consider this practice very or reasonably effective. Even if your call center management has an excellent reputation now, you can't afford to stop improving the quality of your services.
Research reveals that turnover in the call center industry averages 30% and 45%.
If leveraged to the fullest, contact center quality management can help eliminate the high employee turnover that customer service companies usually suffer from.
Moreover, automated quality assurance quickly identifies areas of possible coaching and improvement. This enables you to equip your agents with constant opportunities for growth, thus giving them more confidence in communicating with clients.
Apart from helping gather automated & detailed data right at your fingertips, QA also provides an overview of your future possibilities in case your business goals change. This way, you will have clear guidelines for executing your new journey successfully.
On the other hand, QA also helps identify any bugs in the existing contact center software & targets the systematic errors to avoid them from happening again. Thus, automated QA proves to be a significant step towards an ideal continuation of business operations.
What The Future Holds for Contact Center QA
In this digital age, contact center quality assurance has been instrumental in enhancing agent performance by ensuring compliance, thus improving customer experience.
Quality assurance, driven by AI, is proving to be more accurate, efficient, & relevant to agents.
Below are six trends discussing how automated QA is delivered and revealing new ways companies can capitalize on it to create better outcomes for their customers and the business.
1. Intelligent Automation
A study shows that 31.7% of major companies use AI to augment customer service & this number keeps increasing. AI-augmented customer service is on the rise as enterprises turn to strategic investment in artificial intelligence for their innovative chatbot service.
Moving ahead in the era of automation, businesses are persistently expanding their contact center technology to help positively impact interactions & response times.
Instead of fully automated front-end AI-powered bots, businesses now prefer to invest in a human agent model where human customer service representatives are supported by AI technology.
Automated quality assurance in contact centers includes analyzing every call that takes place. With little or no manual input, teams can deliver faster results with better response times, thus leading to content customers.
2. Enhanced Agent Coaching
The normal state of agent coaching is such wherein managers tell agents what they’re doing wrong and how to improve. Due to micromanagement, it is not just demoralizing for the agents but also inefficient for the rest of the organization.
Automated Quality Assurance helps level-up agent performance by allowing them to view their scorecards, transcripts, and recordings.
This means that QA leaders can share feedback & coaching tips with agents, sales management & other departments, thus making collaboration & growth seamlessly efficient.
3. Efficient Evaluation
Evaluation is key to understanding agent performance in contact center KPIs from caller sentiment to compliance. With a robust & strategic evaluation, it is easier to identify gaps & suggest improvements to create relevant models of training further.
Significant improvements in evaluations thus lead to subjective scoring & a positive impact on targets like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) & First Contact Resolution (FCR).
QA leaders evaluate call center agent performance against a standardized scorecard based on these parameters. The agents can then collaborate on relevant benchmarks with other teams to get actionable insights on future trends.
4. Improved Analytics
QA monitoring typically aligns with a set of quality parameters, which align with the business's overall objectives.
These parameters include call & customer metrics, including handling time, customer satisfaction ratings, average response time & key performance indicators like Net Promoter Scores.
It may also include metrics like IQS (Internal Quality Score), wherein peers, managers & even agents assess team & agents in relation to the company's standards.
Gathering and analyzing data is quite easy with automated software that allows detailed data collection to gain critical insights more efficiently.
As analytics improve, it will lead to an in-depth understanding of customer sentiment. This, in turn, helps to offer much more in-depth information about critical business solutions & how to keep scaling.
5. Better QA Monitoring Accuracy
Manual transcription is not perfect & is prone to errors. In today's digital era, transcription services can transcribe a massive volume of calls within no time, enabling excellent quality assurance & monitoring.
For the last 40 years, transcription services have been getting better. Using AI & other modern technology, automated quality assurance records & analyzes call transcripts for common words to separate them into groups. You can then search for specific phrases and topics with the click of a button.
The bottom line is that as time passes, transcription services will continue to evolve using AI, especially Machine Learning, as technology keeps encountering new data types.
In the future, transcription will continue to grow more accurately to monitor more complex interactions, thus leading to faster & more efficient contact center AI.
6. More Intuitive
Getting the most out of automated quality assurance requires knowing how to gather data & use the same to drive improvement.
Consequently, contact center quality management platforms must be intuitive on many levels for users, leaders, and analysts.
The intuitiveness helps ensure the right interactions are being monitored to derive the insights necessary to scale & thus, drive change.
Automated QA: Driving Businesses Towards Excellence
Before a call center can achieve the QA program it envisions, it is first essential to assess existing call center practices by taking careful note of the areas where it is excelling and where room for improvement still exists.
The customer journey isn't what it used to be. While customer expectations are evolving, technology has evolved to cater to the increasing demands of modern-day customers.
By adopting automated testing, your business can quickly respond to technological changes and exceed expectations with an optimized & mapped customer journey.
The combination of speech analytics & quality management solutions is the driving force behind technology transformation in the contact center. While quality assurance solutions continue to get more accurate & efficient using automation, it will significantly impact customer satisfaction, compliance mitigation & agent effectiveness.
With the right tools, we at Convin help your in-house teams instantly gather crucial agent and customer insights to deliver unparalleled customer experience in every interaction.
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